Still Intrigued by History's Shadows; Günter Grass Worries About the Effects of War, Then and Now

For Günter Grass, as a German and a writer, there is no escaping history. His first and best-known novel, ''The Tin Drum,'' published in 1956, was set around World War II, as was ''Dog Years,'' another of his best. His latest, ''Crabwalk'' (Harcourt), now published in English, recalls a maritime tragedy early in 1945.

Yet Mr. Grass, 75, who won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature, is not a man consumed with the past. The history he evokes is history's shadow on the present. ''The Tin Drum'' forced Germans to confront Nazi specters they were eager to ignore; ''Dog Years,'' the cost of the German economic miracle. And so it is with ''Crabwalk,'' in which Mr. Grass implicitly concludes that the time is ripe to acknowledge that some Germans were also victims of World War II.

Just as ''The Tin Drum'' shook Germans in its day, when ''Crabwalk'' was published in Germany early last year, Mr. Grass was again seen to be breaking a taboo. Since then, the debate about Germans as victims has been fed by publication of ''Der Brand,'' or ''The Fire,'' Jörg Friedrich's best-selling history of the Allied bombing of German cities.

''I was surprised by the reaction to my book,'' Mr. Grass said of ''Crabwalk,'' which some German critics have called his best work in 40 years. ''I thought it would be of interest perhaps for the older generation. But when I do a reading, you see the old generation there, but also many very young people.''

He has also been struck by the strong opposition among young Germans to the war in Iraq and the bombing of Iraqi cities. ''It's not a pacifist thing,'' he said in an interview at his office in the northern city of Lübeck, the first German city to be bombed in World War II. ''It's remembering the air raids on German cities, the feeling of impotence and terror. Somehow the memory has been passed down to the younger generation.''

In ''Crabwalk,'' Mr. Grass addresses two other long-buried wartime memories, that of Germans who were expelled from or fled territories once under Nazi occupation and, more specifically, the sinking by a Soviet submarine of a German ship carrying thousands of German refugees. As always, though, he is most interested in the impact of a distant memory on attitudes today. And he warns here of the dangers posed by repressed memory.

The Wilhelm Gustloff, the converted German cruise ship torpedoed in the Baltic Sea on the night of Jan. 30, 1945, was carrying perhaps as many as 10,500 people, most of them refugees fleeing the Red Army's advance into the German enclave around Danzig (where Mr. Grass himself was born in 1927), now the Polish city of Gdansk. Fewer than 1,250 survived what was arguably the worst maritime disaster in history, yet at the time neither Moscow nor Berlin admitted it had happened.

''After the war, it was a taboo subject in East Germany because it was a taboo in the Soviet Union,'' Mr. Grass said. ''In West Germany, it was possible to speak of it and some documentary work was done, but not in a literary form. In general, it was the first responsibility of Germans to speak about German crimes. The question of German suffering was of secondary importance. No one really wanted to speak about it.''

No one, that is, except extreme rightist groups, which not only dwelled on the Gustloff victims, but also kept alive the story of the real Gustloff, a German Nazi leader in Switzerland who in 1936 was murdered by a young Croatian-born Jew, David Frankfurter. That same year, Hitler named the new ship after the Nazi ''martyr'' and ordered a monument to Gustloff built in his hometown, Schwerin.

In his book, ''scuttling backward to move forward'' like a crab, Mr. Grass traces the lives of Gustloff and Frankfurter until their fatal meeting in Davos on Feb. 4, 1936, and he records how Alexander Marinesko, the Soviet submarine commander, came to sink the Gustloff. But he also creates a fictional refugee and survivor, Tulla Pokriefke, and follows her life to this day.

The narrator is Tulla's son, Paul, who was born on a German torpedo boat one hour after the refugee ship sank. While Tulla remained in East Germany, Paul fled to the West in the 1960's and eventually became a journalist. Then, with Germany's unification in 1990 having unlocked many doors to the past, Paul is commissioned to investigate the tragedy of the Gustloff by a man he variously calls ''the boss,'' ''the old boy'' and ''the employer.''

Paul's own life accompanies him. Now divorced, he has little contact with his teenage son, Konny. In the 1990's, though, Konny grows close to his grandmother Tulla, who buys him a computer and shares with him her obsession with the Gustloff. Soon Konny's fixation surpasses that of Tulla to include admiration for Gustloff and hate for Frankfurter.

Paul discovers this while researching his own project on the Internet. In a right-wing chat room, he follows a debate between a person calling himself Wilhelm -- as in Gustloff -- and one identifying himself as a Jew and calling himself David -- as in Frankfurter. Suddenly Paul understands that Wilhelm is Konny. And he watches with alarm as the two arrange to meet.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

''One of the many reasons I wrote this book was to take the subject away from the extreme right,'' Mr. Grass said, lighting his ever-present pipe. ''They said the tragedy of the Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn't. It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war. It was not a planned act.''

He does believe, however, that the Allied bombing of German cities was criminal because it had no military objectives. ''We started the first air raids of this kind,'' he said, ''killing a city, with Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. Rotterdam, Coventry, Liverpool and London followed. Then it was done to us. What we started came back to us. But both are war crimes.''

He said he also believed the bombing was counterproductive. ''The Allies tried to break the resistance of the German people by killing hundreds of thousands of people, but the resistance grew,'' he said. ''Like today with the Iraqi people. Perhaps many of them hate Saddam Hussein, but they will defend their country because of this bombing. It's so stupid.''

The Iraq war is very much on his mind. He has spoken out against it, but his anger is directed at President Bush and what he calls Mr. Bush's ''fundamentalist singing.''

''In his language, he is close to Osama bin Laden,'' he said. ''Both are always speaking about God. Both are sure that God is on their side. This man Bush is a danger to his own country. He is destroying the image of the United States for years.''

Mr. Grass said that after Sept. 11, 2001, he asked himself why so much hate was directed at the United States and the West. ''It's not enough to hunt down terrorists,'' he went on. ''What's needed is a gigantic Marshall Plan to help countries where people are so poor there is no life possible. That is the only way of reducing terrorism. After the war, Europe had the Marshall Plan, but there is no room in Mr. Bush's thinking for that. The greatness of the United States is lost.''

Mr. Grass lighted his pipe anew. Since ''Crabwalk,'' he has devoted himself to poetry and to the sculptures, paintings and engravings that are now on display beneath his office in a small museum called the Günter-Grass-Haus. Some of his images are of animals that appear in his novels, like the flounder, the rat and the snail. Inspired by ''Crabwalk,'' he has also created dozens of small figures that represent the victims of the Gustloff disaster.

But politics and literature are never far from his life. He said he welcomed Mr. Friedrich's book about the Allied bombing. But he agreed less with W. G. Sebald's essay, ''Air War and Literature,'' published here in 1999 and in English this year, in a collection called, ''On the Natural History of Destruction.'' Mr. Sebald, who died in 2001, argues that postwar German writers ignored German suffering during the war. ''The novels of Henrich Böll and Wolfgang Koeppen deal with these things,'' Mr. Grass said. ''If I had met Sebald, I would have asked him, 'Why don't you write a book about it?' ''

More worrying to Mr. Grass is that, since German unification, a different past has resurfaced. ''We thought in Germany, 'My God, the cold war is over, let's stop this discussion of the war, we have been doing it for years and years,' '' he said. ''But then we have terrible right-wing attacks on foreigners, even here in Lübeck, where a refugee hostel near the harbor was firebombed. History comes back.''

This was certainly on Mr. Grass's mind when he wrote ''Crabwalk,'' yet many older Germans may have overlooked the novel's darker message. ''I received many letters thanking me,'' he recalled. ''They said: 'You found the words. We were thinking about it, but we were unable to express ourselves.' '' Perhaps some of these readers never reached the last page of ''Crabwalk,'' where Mr. Grass offers his final thought on German history.

''It never ends,'' he writes. ''Never will it end.''

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports,
and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on April 8, 2003, on Page E00001 of the National edition with the headline: Still Intrigued by History's Shadows; Günter Grass Worries About the Effects of War, Then and Now. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe